Back in the year 2000 (which was ELEVEN YEARS AGO, fact fans), I enjoyed American McGee’s Alice comprehensively, like you might a bacon sandwich. Foremost in my mind are the environments- the game was a tour through a tattered and bucking dreamscape, with unholy vistas around every other corner. Finally we have some in-game footage of this summer’s sequel, Alice: Madness Returns, and it gives me great pleasure to say that it’s looking swell. Follow me down the rabbit hole, ladies and gents.
It’s actually not just the level design in these videos that’s got me giddy. The sparse amount of platforming in the second video looks inventive enough, and the combat looks really quite exciting. That’s a neat blocking mechanic they’ve got there, and those weapons look like they’ve got some great pop and heft to them. Also, while I’m being positive, I really like the physics on Alice’s hair. This game will be another bacon sandwich, you mark my words.

The first game was everything the recent movie was not, and created a macabre, absurd fantasy world full of memorable characters. And it looks like the got at least the atmosphere spot on with this sequel, and added some very nice visuals. Here’s hoping that the story and characters are as good as the original.

This looks really interesting…. unless reviews say it is really awful I’ll probably buy it just for the visuals alone.
I hope this will be a bigger hit than the first one. I have the feeling that when the first game was released the majority of the PC market was focused on online play, and Quake/UT type games only. And those who might have appreciated the story and weirdness (RPG/adventure gamers for instance) got turned off by the action association.

I think gamers today (hopefully) are a bit more accepting of genre-crossing games, after the success of titles like Bioshock.

They haven’t fixed my main gameplay criticism with the first game. It is a game that often requires pretty precise platforming that still has a camera that often refuses to show you where your characters feet are!

It was worst in the boss battles, where the camera would often stay focussed on the boss cutting off your feet completely from view and in some of the fights where you had to fight on narrow ledges this was a horrible and needless frustration.

Look at the camera in the above videos, it is much the same as the original was. Many times the camera clips off your feet as you are looking around.

I played through the original in full when it first came out, so I could well be wrong about the exact mechanism by which the camera worked but after all these years my main memory of the game is frustration at being unable to see my feet a lot of times when it really mattered.

Looking at your feet is hardly an option if you need to fight a boss, jump to a higher platform, avoid enemies, jump between moving platforms etc and the fact remains that in a platform game where precise movement is often needed the camera should make every effort to always show the characters feet.

Watch through the videos above, see how often the camera clips off Alice’s feet, yes, sometimes it is unavoidable without having the camera track through a wall or something but often it is totally avoidable.

If you need to see more of your character and the environment, the only way I can think of is to pull the camera farther away from the character. Which Alice would happily let you do via the options menu.

Oh holy crap, that looks totally sick! In many ways, it reminds me of Psychonauts with its splendidly unhinged art direction and lovely platforming. If I had one criticism, it’s that some of the effects don’t really gel with the art style. Most of the animations are seriously slick, but some things (notably the vines disappearing in the last video) seem to clash, and that’s rather disappointing. It does look seriously slick though, so I can’t wait to play it.

The first was excellent! I especially liked that they used the Quake 3 engine.
I wonder which path they took with this one. Will stay tuned.

[edit]
Oh well, Unreal Engine 3 is not too bad.
Still mad at them for not porting it to Linux, though, which probably would’ve meant that it wouldn’t have been all to difficult to get this Alice game to run under Linux.

That’s done for legal reasons. Asking for your age in each and every instance shows a commitment to regulatory compliance that they probably have to prove as a measurable statistic or defined process. That you can freely lie about it is not their fault and not the point – they’ve asked you to identify your age and that’s all that matters.

I’m pretty sure it grows out of oral communication. In the States, at least, it’s more common to say “January 21st, 2011″ than “the 21st of January, 2011.” So when it came time to standardize a way of jotting that down in shorthand, the order was maintained: “1/21/2011.”

But back to the main topic, I remember the original Alice game beckoning from the shelves of major retailers. Virgin Records in NYC kept that game stocked for years. I hadn’t realized there was so much nostalgia surrounding it, because I remember — after eventually buying it — that I felt like it was a bit of a scam: all style, terribly unthought-out gameplay.

It’s a nice action game. As I mentioned earlier it uses the Quake 3 engine so that’s what you should expect, just not as fast-paced.
The jump and run sequences are nice (although people complain about the controls) and the fighting sequences are okay, too.
I mostly played it because of the style, though because I like that gothicesque style coupled with the oddities of the wonderland which discerns it from the other games for me.

From Old Man Murray
“[American McGee’s Alice’s] brains have been pasteurized!
Now [Alice’s] super Superego is all that stands between [Alice] the Megahero and [Alice] the fruitloop.
[Alice’s] Superhero Superego must seek out the golden udders of lucidity that lie deep within [her] cow struck cranium. Will [she] find the magical teats in time? Or will [she] teeter off the edge of sanity?
To make things worse, [Alice’s] churning imagination has released the cream of evil villainy, and they are hellbent on preventing [her] regaining [her] mental balance.
For those of you currently nodding your “American McGee #1 Genius” foam Pope hats, I’d like to point out that that almost perfect summary of Alice’s edgy plot comes courtesy of the Earthworm Jim 3D manual. Other than replacing the words “Earthworm Jim” with the word “Alice”, I haven’t touched it. You can thank McGee’s actually probably quite brilliant publicists that we won’t all be not watching Wes Craven’s Earthworm Jim 3D next Christmas. And you can thank me for the crazy wording on that sentence.”
Basically I agree and think Rayman 2 was the better game.

I was tinking about that too. For someone writing at a website that just run such a great OMM tribute, Mr Smith sure seems way too easy to impress. I feel this piece would’ve gotten a rather merciless treatment by a 1999 Erik. I mean, “the combat looks really quite exciting”? Seriously? They just put a machinegun in Alice in Wonderland, man! That has to be the gameplay equivalent of a square room stacked with crates. Even that mind-numbingly stupid Tim Burton movie didn’t go there.

Sure Alice was really really pretty to look at and whatnot; but come on, it didn’t exactly have the most interesting gameplay. This looks just as nice, but doesn’t really seem to be trying to be much more either.

Dammit, I hate these players. Why can’t they stream properly? I have to pause the videos forever so they buffer. And that’s especially annoying when Alice is standing doing nothing forever in the second video. :(

Tentatively interested. The gameplay from the vid though looks like it might end up getting repetitive and stupid; which is an easy trap for platformer-ish games to get into. Playing just to see what the levels end up looking like isn’t really a game at that point, but an animated art gallery. Toss in some RPG character development elements, some sort of more interesting narrative then what we’ve seen,

This looks very odd, which is a good thing, but I’m confused about the nature of the game, having not played the first. Is it a horror, or just a platformer with a scary backdrop? Does it actually have a good story or..?

It’s one of the most willfully odd looking games since The Void and Zeno Clash which is a plus point and as people have mentioned before it does smack a little of Psychonauts as well (although somewhat less open).

Combat/platforming looks like it could potentially be fiddly and awkward at times but it’s really hard to tell without playing the thing.

i’ll definitely be trying the demo anyway, as this is certianly the type of thing I want to see more of.

Macabre fantasy is plenty appealing to me, I just hope it’s not a mindless action game. ‘Clear the room to proceed’ is a whole lot less interesting than purposeful interactions with characters. For me, no matter how interesting a game world is, the experience is utterly cheapened after you’ve killed a hundred of the same enemy type…

Glad to see there’s a fair bit of shrinking and growing in this one. I loved the original but always found the size-changing aspect of the story to be conspicuously absent, save for that bit with the ants.

As a big fan of the source material (the Lewis Carroll books, not Hot Topic) and a big fan of anything weird, I still absolutely loathed the original. It was very cool looking but boy was it boring to play. Bad platforming, awful third-person aiming, boring combat, dreadful camera, constant unnecessary cutscenes etc. It was Donkey Kong 64 in goth makeup. This… To be frank it just looks like a re-skin or mod of the first game. I won’t be trying the series again unless there’ve been significant gameplay improvements, but it seems like it’s straight out of 1999.